On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 12:23:17PM -0800, Hugh Dickins wrote:
I haven't updated those 3.18 patches since that time, and was a day or two away from asking you, Greg, what is the status of 3.18? I didn't bother to update those patches because I saw it marked EOL as soon as Meltdown+Spectre was announced; yet it now appears to have a life beyond death, getting non-Meltdown+Spectre updates every week or so.
I am not doing any Meltdown/Spectre patches for 3.18, because yes, it really is EOL. I am only continuing to maintain it because there are some vendors that rely on it at the moment, and they usually just take these releases + the android-common kernel tree together. As the needed ARM Meltdown patches are in the android-common tree right now (and not really anywhere else at all), that is sufficient for their use.
I can certainly (but not until next week) put together a 3.18.92- based tarfile or tarfiles, equivalent to what I sent for 3.8 and 3.10 (on kaiser-discuss backports list) a couple of days ago. That is, like what I sent before for 3.18.72, but with all the fixups and pti= boot option and KAISER->PAGE_TABLE_ISOLATION renaming that's come in since (But I cannot bear to go further myself, into retpoline etc, sorry.)
Would a 3.18 Kaiser update be helpful, or are you preferring to force people off 3.18 by not providing those updates? Or preferring to wait a bit longer, until 4.4 and 4.9 and 4.14 have settled down?
I'm not recommending anyone use the 3.18 tree unless they know what they are doing right now :)
And yes, I would love for them to move off of that tree as soon as possible, but usually due to huge out-of-tree SoC patches, they can not do that easily, if at all, right now.
So no need for a 3.18 Kaiser update for me at all, I do not need or want it.
thanks,
greg k-h